Neil Young continues the commemoration of his now half-century-plus relationship with Crazy Horse by releasing a ten-track album of some of his earliest studio recordings with the group. A viable companion piece to 2006’s Live At The Fillmore East, the approximately forty-two-minute LP Early Daze is comprised of familiar material in mostly rare, unreleased versions.
Selections written with and by the late Danny Whitten become rightful homages to the guitarist/songwriter/vocalist. He sings lead in a fragile but but earnest voice on an unreleased take of “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown”–first issued as “Downtown” on Crazy Horse’s 1971 eponymous debut album and then later on Tonight’s The Night–as well as the heretofore unavailable recording of “Look At All The Things.”
On the latter, a solo composition by Whitten also from Crazy Horse, the foursome’s seeming impromptu comping hints at the abundance of ideas at hand. The twang in Whitten and Young’s guitars on things like “Dance Dance Dance” is unmistakable, and rough as some of the musicianship and singing is, the participants’ unmitigated pleasure is obvious: hear the whoops of delight and relaxed banter at multiple junctures.
For that reason alone, it’s worth paying close attention to the audio quality of Early Daze. Largely produced by Neil Young with his now-deceased mentor David Briggs (with one track overseen by the artist with keyboardist/vocalist/percussionist Jack Nitzsche who also appeared on the aforementioned concert album), John Hanlon, John Nowland and Chris Bellman engineered this collection from the original master tapes; not surprisingly, there’s a depth to the sonics that belies the skeletal two guitars/bass/drums arrangement even as the mix highlights the aforementioned Nitzsche’s electric piano on “Winterlong”).
The latter composition has only appeared before as an inclusion in the 1977 anthology Decade. But that piece of forlorn glory was nonetheless different from this one, as is also the case with a jovial rendering of “Wonderin’,” a Young original that would eventually appear on 1983’s ever-so-quirky Everybody’s Rockin’.
Equally stark a contrast therein is this version of “Helpless:” It’s bereft of most of the melodrama in the track on CSNY’s Deja Vu. Then there’s the nine minutes-plus of “Down by the River,” its natural flow indicative of the chemistry Neil discovered in playing and singing with these three members of The Rockets.
Previously unavailable mixes of ‘Birds’ and ‘Cinnamon Girl’ also show up here. The latter appears in a mono mix that includes a guitar outro missing from the version on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, while the former—featuring acoustic and electric guitars plus piano that conjures an intimate, fragile mood—hearkens to the earliest sessions for what was to be a sequel to that LP before the work morphed into After The Gold Rush.
Only two tracks out of the ten here have been previously issued—both “Dance Dance Dance” and “Everybody’s Alone” are included in Archives Vol. I–Early Daze is effectively ‘the album that never was’ in the oeuvre of this iconoclastic artist. By making it available on CD, black vinyl, and an indie clear vinyl pressing (with an exclusive poster), Neil Young is reaching out to as many audiences as possible.
Yet he mitigates his mercenary marketing approach somewhat by providing comprehensive packaging, including vintage photos and lyrics for all the material. And, considering it follows the live Fu##in’ Up from early this year and comes out while the Canadian rock icon is on tour with the current configuration of The Horse (featuring Willie Nelson’s son Micah), this campaign ultimately defies the flip definition of a ‘cash grab.’
Neil Young has always taken an idiosyncratic approach to archiving his work, but the personal pride he’s displayed in such efforts lately sets such projects (and their author) even further apart from his contemporaries and their similarly conceived endeavors.
